The Short Stories of Saki (H.H. Munro)

Collection of one hundred thirty-five stories which demonstrate Saki's gift of grace and satire

From inside the book

Results 1-3 of 47

Page 403The vicar's wife reflected that Teresa seemed to be the one person who showed
no immediate anxiety to supply Bertie with a wife, but she kept the thought to
herself. Mrs. Yonelet was a woman of resourceful energy and generalship; she ...

Page 557“Hullo, Bertie!” she exclaimed sedately, when the figure arrived at the painted
chair that was the nearest neighbour to her own, and dropped into it eagerly, yet
with a certain due regard for the set of its trousers; “hasn't it been a perfect spring
...

Page 558“I'd find some way to stop her if I were in your place,” said Ella valiantly, and Bertie felt that the glamour of his anxiously deliberated present had faded away
in the disagreeable restriction that hedged round its acknowledgment. “Is
anything the ...

About the author (1983)

H. H. Munro, better known as "Saki," was born in Burma, the son of an inspector-general for the Burmese police. Sent to England to be educated at the Bedford Grammar School, he returned to Burma in 1893 and joined the police force there. In 1896, he returned again to England and began writing first for The Westminster Gazette and then as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post. Best known for his wry and amusing stories, Saki depicts a world of drawing rooms, garden parties, and exclusive club rooms. His short stories at their best are extraordinarily compact and cameolike, wicked and witty, with a careless cruelty and a powerful vein of supernatural fantasy. They deal, in general, with the same group of upper-class Britishers, whose frivolous lives are sometimes complicated by animals---the talking cat who reveals their treacheries in love, the pet ferret who is evil incarnate. The nom de plume "Saki" was borrowed from the cupbearer in Omar Khayyam's (see Vol. 2) The Rubaiyat. Munro used it for political sketches contributed to the Westminster Gazette as early as 1896, later collected as Alice in Westminster. The stories and novels were published between that time and the outbreak of World War I, when he enlisted as a private, scorning a commission. He died of wounds from a sniper's bullet while in a shell hole near Beaumont-Hamel. One of his characters summed up Saki's stories as those that "are true enough to be interesting and not true enough to be tiresome.